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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
78
Mixed:
15
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Jun 12, 2024
Season 4 Review:
We mostly watch The Boys for gnarly violence and otherwise graphic material. While the show still leans too hard on that aspect—there are so many floutings of taboo that it all begins to feel curiously banal—much of its excess is guiltily appreciated. One watches the series eagerly awaiting the next gruesome thing. Such anticipation goes a considerable distance in covering up season four’s erratic plotting. There are myriad story threads tangled together, longer arcs and shorter digressions that, in their abundance, try patience.
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Jun 11, 2024
Season 4 Review:
Varied threads, which don’t even include various team members of the namesake crew struggling with guilt from their traumatic pasts, already make the season feel less focused than its immediate predecessor. .... Season 4 starts to show the strain of that effort, both on the viewer’s tolerance for despair and the series itself.
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RogerEbert.comJun 2, 2022
Season 3 Review:
“The Boys” has grown up a bit, but it’s also grown outward, to the point where it becomes nearly impossible to truly keep track of its expansive cast of characters and the myriad politicking they have to navigate. ... “The Boys” is A Lot to take in, and the surface-level cracks in the façade of its superhero and social critiques become ever more visible.
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Jun 11, 2024
Season 4 Review:
It takes real skill to take what is essentially the same story and disguise it as a fresh idea. That gambit has served The Boys well before, but Season 4 may be the weakest so far. Jagged stakes have been softened from season after season of repetition; the series has now been completely overwhelmed by its nihilist themes.
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Apr 8, 2026
Season 5 Review:
The Boys, unfortunately, doesn’t have anything new to say. It’s trying too hard to speak to the times, but having a scene in which Homelander talks about making this a god-fearing, safer nation again, to be met with chants of “USA! USA!” has no depth. I hope a proper map has been drawn for the show’s conclusion, but the meandering twofer of a premiere ebbs and flows in quality.
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RogerEbert.comSep 4, 2020
Season 2 Review:
This is the season that helped me “get” the appeal of "The Boys," especially as it’s more fun to spend time with these characters well-past their try-hard introductions. ... But season two also proves that if the series is going to be so bloated and only sporadically punchy, it’s never going to be as powerful as it thinks it is.
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Jul 26, 2019
Season 1 Review:
There’s a lot happening around The Boys‘ core concept, from a human-supe romance and a plan to sell superheroes to the U.S. military via Trumpian fear-stoking. There’s some serious Freudian baggage around Homelander and his handler and a number of gleefully absurd side vignettes. But none of it adds up to much, and there’s a constant sense that the show is treading over too-familiar ground when it’s not simply treading water.
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RogerEbert.comJul 25, 2019
Season 1 Review:
“The Boys” has too little emotional momentum, and trouble with its construction throughout—it’s too obviously taped together by conversations where one person tells another of a past incident solely so that we can learn about it, a cheap way to push the plot forward and cover exposition.
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